A Beginner's Garden Update

Although they say that growing your own vegetables can save you over 75% off the price of buying them, we are not so sure. This beautiful little "red" pepper is our first and only vegetable to come from our $350 investment. It is small and the wrong color, but after two weeks on the vine without changing, we decided it was time to harvest. So, here it is, the world's most expensive "red" pepper! A $350 beauty! We are hoping to cut the price of this one down with future harvests of tomatoes and eggplant, but are not counting on it at this point. Our garden looks pretty anemic in spite of plenty of sun and water... We have a lot to learn! Bon appetit!

On the other hand, the produce we are receiving from our CSA is bountiful and impressive. Compare Brett holding our wimpy "red" pepper with Pierce posing by this robust head of cabbage from our CSA!

Can you tell which farmers have five generations of experience and which ones have five weeks?

Hilton Head Vacation

We went to Hilton Head for Memorial Day weekend to visit Brett's mom and sister and enjoy some time at the beach. We had a great time at Grandma's house, ate some great food, and loved our three full days of beach time. Both Pierce and Sydney loved being at the beach and it was fun to watch them play in the sand and water. They are so lucky to have two different grandparents at the beach so they will have lots of childhood memories at the beach.

Backyard Update

We've been very busy over the past month doing things around the house and traveling a little bit. One of the projects we took on this spring was to make some improvements to our back yard. We added a fence to keep the kiddos in, and planted some privacy trees and some ornamental trees. In the "after" photo, the purple tree on the left is a Japanese Maple, the trees along the back fence are Arborvitae and the tiny tree on the right is a Gala Apple tree with blueberry bushes in front of it! We're looking forward to having some fruit in a few years! We originally wanted to put in a patio and outdoor fireplace, but once we realized how expensive those things are, we decided to divide the project into two parts and do one now and the patio later. We are really enjoying having "phase I" completed!

Before:

After: